Business coaching services are a powerful development tool. They can help individuals reach their career goals and help organizations drive organization-wide change. 

At an individual level, business coaching helps employees change their mindsets and skillsets, particularly leadership skills. Coaches can help employees in a number of ways, such as these:

• Getting them ready for a new role: Business coaches are skilled at identifying development needs. They help coachees establish a roadmap to address areas that will have the greatest impact on their growth. Specifically, they give their coachees the tools, practices and support needed to increase their capabilities and improve their performance.
• Accelerating impact in a new role: Coaches can speed a person’s adjustment to new responsibilities and a new culture. A faster adjustment means higher chances of job success.
• Strengthening communication and interpersonal skills: Employees often fall short in skills such as influence, listening, empathy and self-awareness. These deficits can derail a career, yet they are highly coachable.
• Challenging leaders’ perspective: Leaders typically have a deep understanding of their own organization and its dynamics. Coaches help leaders understand what’s happening outside their organization. They offer an objective perspective that spans industries to balance that internal perspective. As a result, coaches can help leaders think through complex issues and make better decisions without agendas and biases.

At an organization level, coaching can help:

• Drive transformation: When coaching is connected to business goals, everyone is moving in the same direction and it accelerates organization transformation.
• Increase performance: People who are being coached are more likely to have the skills, mindset and motivation to push their performance to the next level.
• Improve engagement and retention: Coaching instills in participants a commitment to growing from within and to living up to their full potential. In turn, this raises morale, increases employee retention and reduces costs.

Business coaching is not a one-size-fits-all solution. There are various types of coaching, depending on who you are talking to and the objectives you want to drive. Here is a sampling of the different types of professional coaching services:

• Executive coaching services: It’s never been harder to lead in today’s environment of constant, disruptive change. Leaders need to know what to do when they don’t know what to do. Executive coaching is one of the fastest ways to help a leader grow. It can also help your organization manage important leadership transitions, sustain behavior change and achieve better results. 
   
  Executive coaching draws on proven methodologies, but it’s a highly tailored approach. It's a development process guided by the coach but powered by the leader. Rather than providing ready-made answers or advice, coaches work to elicit leader-driven strategies, actions and solutions. Meanwhile, they hold the leader accountable for meeting their commitments.
• Leadership coaching services: The jump from individual contributor to leader is huge. And every leadership transition after that requires another mindset change. Leadership coaching is a form of 1:1 coaching typically phased over three to six months. It helps leaders build the capabilities they need to inspire and enable their teams to thrive in a disruptive world.
• Career coaching services: Change is never easy, and starting a new career is one of the biggest leaps out there. Career coaching is done one-on-one and helps individuals identify, prepare for and obtain a new job internally or externally. Organizations often provide career coaching as part of a redundancy package.
• Team coaching services: Teamwork is becoming increasingly important as business challenges become more complex. Team coaching brings together groups with similar opportunities for coaching on a specific topic.
• Peer coaching circles: Coaching circles are a trusted environment in which a small group of peers can coach each other. The entire session is facilitated by a coaching expert. Coaching circles help people work through problems while building networks and deeper work relationships.
• Assessment debriefs: Assessments are most beneficial when individuals understand and buy into the feedback. The key is explaining how individuals can use assessment results in their ongoing development. Debriefs are typically one-off sessions lasting between one and four hours that take a deep dive into assessment results.
• DE&I coaching services: Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) coaches lead participants through an extensive personal analysis of how their experiences with differences affect how inclusive they are. It’s a powerful solution that leads to true behavior change.

The key to successful business coaching is to direct coaching toward a shared business goal. Without aligning toward a goal, coaching can help individuals pick up new skills, but it won’t drive the organization forward.

Business coaching is more important than ever because organizations are coping with never-ending disruption. This transformational change is faster and bigger than it ever has been before. And it’s affecting everyone at every organization at every level. 

In a constantly shifting environment, every person needs the right mindset to thrive. That mindset is something that coaching helps people achieve.

And, with turnover at an all-time high, employee retention initiatives have never been more important. Coaching is a powerful tool for engaging and retaining employees. It shows that you’re willing to invest in employees, helping them develop skills that will advance their careers. And coaching enables them to build skills to engage and motivate their teams and the people around them.

Business coaching services are especially powerful when everyone in an organization is coached at once. But coaching cannot be random; it has to be tied to overall business strategy. When coaching at scale is connected to business goals, it can help build alignment across the organization. It can also drive organization-wide behavioral change. 

This type of business coaching, which we call connected coaching, begins with a clear understanding of business goals. Then coaches determine what capabilities the workforce needs to reach those goals. Guided by assessments, they determine where individuals need to grow and change to unlock their potential. Throughout the process, they never stop focusing on their overall goal: building a more agile, engaged workforce and organization.

The coaching industry is undergoing massive growth, and there are a lot of choices in the market. But certain characteristics set leading business coaching companies apart from the rest. 

Here are some key attributes to look for when you are choosing business and leadership coaching services: 

• Connectedness: To be effective, coaching solutions have to be connected to your business strategies. More specifically, business coaching must link to your organization’s leadership development and talent management goals.  
   
  Coaches also have to be connected to the individual. They need a deep understanding of the person they’re coaching. Assessments can give coaches insights into the person, including what motivates them and where they can grow.  
   
  At the same time, coaches need to recognize what the organization needs from that person. That means coaches must understand the interplay between the organization’s overarching goals and the role’s success profile. Only then can they tailor their coaching journey to the person, the role and the organization.
• Versatility: While coaching at scale is important, you want to meet your employees where they are. A great business coach can create different coaching journeys for different levels and groups within the organization.
• Scalability: Many coaching companies offer platforms that enable you to roll out business coaching at scale and can handle different development journeys.
• Compatibility: It’s critical to match the right coach to the right person. Successful coaching relationships start with a qualified coach who has the right experience to help the person being coached.
• Training: Look for a coaching company that believes learning is ongoing and that focuses on continuous development. Certifications and training show that a company takes the professional development of its coaches seriously.
• Investment in coaching: Look for an organization that treats its coaches right. Coaching is a tough role, and coaches need coaching and support too.
• Measurability: You should be able to track the return on your investment in business coaching using metrics and qualitative insights. Potential metrics include the number of coaching sessions completed and the employee’s satisfaction with the outcome.  
   
  You might also measure how applicable the skills being coached are to the individual’s work. You could also study the attrition and promotion rates of those coached. The organization should use feedback from coaching assignments to inform wider development and talent management initiatives.
• Trustworthiness: Effective coaching relies on a foundation of trust between an individual and their coach. Successful coaching requires vulnerability. When that level of trust exists, people have the psychological safety to speak their minds and bare their souls. They can share not only what they want and where they see themselves but also their fears and failures.  
   
  That’s where all great coaching starts. Only by building these deep and meaningful relationships can you shift beliefs and mindsets.

Business coaching helps organizations drive change at scale — if it’s connected to business objectives. When you align business and coaching goals, such as creating agility or building an inclusive organization, coaching has a remarkable impact. It can accelerate organizational transformation, change organization culture, strengthen organizational capabilities and engage your employees.

More specifically, business coaching can:

• Reduce talent attrition: Coaching instills in participants a commitment to growing from within and to living up to their full potential. In turn, this raises morale, increases employee retention and reduces costs.
• Increase productivity: Coaching participants are more likely to make better decisions and less likely to make costly business mistakes.
• Deliver results: Coaching participants are more likely to drive your organization forward. They’re highly engaged, proactive and armed with the tools to lead. This will give your organization a significant competitive advantage.
• Lower risk: Coaching will help you get ahead of potential talent management problems. As a result, it reduces risk by closing gaps in your talent processes and growing your leadership pipeline.

When you invest in enterprise coaching, you build the skillsets and mindsets necessary to advance your organization to the next stage. When everyone is moving together toward the same goal, you create a tipping point that drives the whole organization forward.

Coaching is an art and a science. That means coaching experts need to have a clear methodology that they follow for working with clients based on data. The foundation of that process is a data-driven assessment that gives them insights into the person they are coaching.

But coaches also need to be creative. They must be able to flex to meet the needs of different people with different titles, experiences and goals.

Here are some other key attributes to look for in your next business coach:

• Credentialed: They should be accredited with documented training and qualifications in your industry.
• Adaptable: Although coaches should rely on proven methods, they should also adjust their methods to their coachee’s needs.
• Experienced: Your coach should have experience that matches or exceeds that of the person they are coaching. If they are coaching someone in an executive role, the coach needs to have senior-level experience to give them credibility. If they are working in a particular industry, they should have experience in or relevant to that industry.
• Trustworthy: They must be able to make coaching participants feel safe. If they don’t build a relationship that encourages coachees to share, their efforts won’t lead to lasting change.
• Insightful: To make learning stick, a coach can’t just spoon-feed information to coaching participants. Instead, they have to help their coachees reach their own conclusions. This comes down to the coach’s ability to ask the right questions.
• Agile: Coaches often act as a sounding board for the anxiety that comes with the risk of change. Coaches must model the ability to deal with ambiguity, providing the right balance of inquiry and discovery with advice and guidance.
• Courageous: Coaching experts must challenge leaders’ mental models and assumptions. They must expose beliefs and patterns that no longer serve leaders and those they lead while introducing new mindsets. They must also be able to challenge their clients to steer a clear, coherent and viable path forward.
• Trustworthy: Coaching success often depends on whether there’s a strong working alliance between the coach and coachee. To start building that alliance, coaches should clarify expectations, set goals and remind the coachee that all sessions are confidential. Setting a foundation for trust early in an engagement has a significant impact on the outcome of coaching. Coaches can continue to build trust throughout the relationship by being attentive, offering thoughtful feedback and avoiding judgment in every meeting.